Effectively Managing Energy Consumption

We grow ever closer to next week’s Emerson Exchange Conference in Orlando and I hope we’ll have the chance to connect if you’ll be joining us. Many of the subject matter experts featured in the posts here on the blog will be there to share their experiences and best practices. And, your peers at other companies will be sharing their experiences.

Emerson’s Pete Sharpe, whom we’ve featured numerous posts, will be there sharing ways to better manage industrial energy consumption and expenses. He’ll be showing the Energy Advisor, a Real-Time Energy Management Information System (EMIS) application that helps bring visibility to where energy is being consumed and how. Energy Advisor leverages infrastructure from OSIsoft and software from RtTEch’s RtEMIS system.

Visualizations from this application are the foundation for prioritizing energy saving projects, tracking improvements over time and taking immediate action on over-consumption events. Pete shared with me that Energy Advisor adds dashboards and advanced prediction features based on 1st principle models in addition to the standard reports available from RtTech.

Some of the visualizations include real-time energy consumption, notifications of over-consumption, overconsumption root cause analysis, and energy expense. These visualizations and analyses are available to plant staff through a web browser-based interface.

When Valero’s Pembroke refinery set out a few years ago to upgrade their aging DCS system, the vision was to not just replace in-kind. Valero’s strategy was to take advantage of new technology to optimally blend certified gasoline directly to a ship, automatically, closed-loop. In February 2014, that vision was accomplished.

You can connect and interact with other energy management professionals in the Industrial Energy track of the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

3 comments

Pervasive sensing using WirelessHART transmitters goes very well with analytics software like EMIS ontop of the plant historian like OSIsoft PI-system. Lots of sensors have to be be deployed for unit-wise measurement of WAGES (Water, compressed Air, fuel Gas, Electricity, and Steam). In an existing plant, wireless sensors are easiest to deploy as no cable has to be laid, and no junction boxes or cable trays have to be opened. The energy management solution shares the same wireless infrastructure and plant historian as the sensors used to improve reliability and maintenance productivity as well as reducing HS&E risk. See further explanation in this article: